If we delve into the practice, yoga is not so much what we do, as who we Are - an unbroken, indivisible, undamageable totality, interconnected with everything in existence. When we practice with attention and awareness, this becomes not a philosophical or esoteric idea, but our actual felt sense in our bodies. Instead of being caught in our stories, attachments, resistance, habits, or worries we can learn to rest in relaxed, responsive awareness of the whole interconnected totality of self and environment - what neuroscientists might call present centered default mode. With attention, we notice that everything arises, unfolds and dissolves, experiencing ourselves and the world as constantly changing, inherently whole.

From Michael Stone (2008): Yoga refers to the undivided wholeness and intimate interconnection of reality...The universe of even one breath cycle is completely whole and unbroken...[and] practicing yoga postures with precision of attention cuts through polarities in our thinking because the mind gets so focused on immediate experience that the experience opens into a wider dimension of interconnection [and interdependence].

Our practice offers us the opportunity to be with what is and experience our inherent freedom. The word we use for yoga posture is asana. This means not so much a particular shape, as our "sitting with" what is arising from moment to moment with a physical and psychological balance of sthira - steadiness - and sukha - ease, spaciousness, and freedom of being.

From Michael Stone (2008): The form of the pose is secondary to what the pose is orienting the body-mind towards....[yoga is involved with] stretching our mind and body outside historical parameters and self-imposed narratives, and then settling the the bodymind into stillness...Contemplating asana [not just physically but] psychologically turns a yoga pose into a tool of awareness, an opportunity for liberation.

This week, we'll continue with Michael Stone from his book The Inner Tradition of Yoga (2008), and the notion of yoga less as something we do, and more as a way of being. I particularly love the felt sense of the phrase "breathing our circumstances":

Yoga is the natural state of being with what is, and practice supports us in waking up to this natural state... our work as yoga practitioners is to breathe our circumstances -paying close attention to what the [body], breath and mind are doing at any given moment.

Don't forget Tuesday classes start this week at Helga Beer/Lynn Wylie yoga and continue through July. Also, a workshop there thisSunday the 10th with RMT Bisia Belina on experiential anatomy. Designed for yoga teachers, but open to any committed and interested student​. For more information, contact me mbutot@shaw.ca, or bisia@shaw.ca

Happy exploring!

Author

Misha Butot RCSW, ERYT 500 is a longtime clinical social worker and senior yoga teacher living in Victoria, BC